General Session
The General Session of JavaOne 2006 kicked-off with Johnathan Schwartz introducing several members from industry, including Marc Fleury from JBoss. Fleury recently had his company, that provides support services for the open-source JBoss Java EE application server, acquired by Redhat. I have an eternal grudge against Fleury because of his rude and offensive behavior at a small, birds-of-a-feather session during JavaOne 2003. His arrogance and preference for offensive language make him less of a leader, in my mind. In any case, Schwartz was thrilled to associate Sun with JBoss.
A demonstration was given on the AJAX capabilities of Java. The age-old Petstore application was re-worked to use AJAX. It featured some nice UI techniques to make the website more dynamic and visually-appealing. The website where the Petstore demo can be obtained from is here.